1) Face to face is best when communicating! You get to see and feel all verbal and non verbal things, see facial expressions, laugh together instantaneously. In a group setting, try to standup / or sit down ... form a circle facing each other. Then have a conversation! Online? Get a laptop camera and turn it on during meetings! 2) In a group session, it is best to have no one dominating the conversation. Use the concept of the 'Talking Stick' (see and read image below)... to provide equal opportunity for everyone to talk and be heard. The 'talking stick'…
The 2019 ACC Men's Basketball Tournament is the postseason men's basketball tournament for the Atlantic Coast Conference being held right now at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina from March 12–16, 2019. It is the 66th annual edition of the tournament. Teams' and coaches' respective prowesses in full display. All teams are high-performing teams. The fruits of their labor are the shots they make into points... the results...outcomes of value; got to produce/achieve these! The thing is, a team can dribble, steal, rebound, pass, attempt and miss shots...and for a great length of time with no score? That's ridiculous! That…
Have your team try using the power of a metaphor…a metaphor that each member is familiar with. Good exercise to try is this: have your team come up with a metaphor that they can use to evoke emotions…powerful enough to kindle some sparks to the team’s quest for high performance… which would be way beyond how they are performing today… beyond just going through their daily grind and going through the motions. For example, a fruit-bearing tree comes to mind. Ask your team these powerful questions (have them ponder about it): what are the “fruits of their labor”? What manifests…
Can you imagine talking about an idea to someone... and at the end of your talk they did not get what you were talking about? Have you had a coaching moment like that with your coachee? So, what to do? May I offer two things for your consideration: 1) Use the power of language: Build your idea piece by piece out of concepts that your coachee already understands using language that already exists in his/her mind… her/his language, not yours! Start where he/she is at. Use language to weave together the idea with the terms and concepts your coachee understands.…
Sometimes, coaches give hints to help the coachee find his/her way to a solution. Telling something that you have seen work as a solution -- for a certain scenario by other teams -- to a problem that is similar to what the coachee is facing. This way, the coachee is primed with some ideas to start off with. Then go back to being a coach -- asking powerful questions; you, as a coach, got to have the coachee experience the joy of discovery of the solution.
Sometimes, in some situations, you just have to momentarily stop being a coach and be a mentor... then at the right moment you pull yourself back to being a coach. Let me explain... To be continued.
A coach's mindset is like that of a good chess player's mindset during a game. Magnus Carlsen: 2018 world chess championshipA good chess player is solutions centric. Every game presents unique situations at every move... and it requires both players to dig deep in thought ... there is no 'canned problem and solution'. The game of Chess makes them think hard -- and their understanding is both deep in depth and wide in breadth -- towards a solution. Fabiano Caruana: 2018 World Chess ChampionshipCoaching is a 'game' that makes the coach and the coachee think ... towards a solution... given…
You read that right! Coach does not stick to just one coachee ... there are a lot of people to coach! Pacquiao - roach splitThe sooner the coachee reaches his/her highest potential or goal, the better; the coach then moves on... so is the coachee ... both feeling satisfied (at least that is the hope).
Agile Release Train (ART), per SAFe, "... is a long-lived team of Agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, develops and delivers solutions incrementally, using a series of fixed-length Iterations within a Program Increment (PI) timebox. The ART aligns teams to a common business and technology mission." Join us as we explore "Building High-Performing ART" -- a 7-part series. These concepts are not just for the ART but are also applicable to Agile Teams, and at home as well. To build a high-performing ART, you have to be the servant-leader and coach to the ART. Apply a "servant-leader and coach"…
